In the late 1970s a lone, virtually penniless, politically unconnected Vietnam veteran -- Jan Scruggs -- started on a mission to construct a national monument to a war that many Americans wanted to forget.  His story is the classic American success story -- straight out of the American self-reliance tradition -- and “the Wall,” which is now so cherished, became a reality in 1982.  However, at a certain point in the development stage, fierce opposition to the nature of the proposed design arose from other veterans and even from the designer, opposition that eventually included people at the highest levels of government, opposition that came close to sinking the project, and opposition that eventually forced compromise and negotiation.  In 1984, for instance, a statue was added to the site as part of the agreement that allowed the construction of the Wall to continue.  And in 1993 came yet a third addition -- a woman's memorial.  Thus, the question of how best to represent this war, a war that we “lost,” engaged an array of vigorous viewpoints.

This controversy put “history on trial.”  Perennial questions such as these were hotly contested.  What history should we tell?  How should we tell it?  Who should tell it?  Who “owns” history?  Who speaks for the nation?  Who speaks to the nation?  This controversy engaged the nation’s highest concerns, left a rich paper trail to follow, and yields significant lessons about our democratic processes in matters of constructing history for the edification of future generations.

The "history" of this attempt to represent history can tell us much about the function of history in our culture and why history matters. 

Thus, the pages that follow enable users to experience the evolution of the Vietnam Wall controversy -- in some sense to relive it -- by reading through a chronological list of documents divided into five "rounds." 

This site, a companion to the Enola Gay Controversy ("how do we remember a war that we won?"), was designed for use in "History on Trial," an online first-year writing course initially offered spring 2004 as part of the Clipper Project at Lehigh University.

Lehigh students and anyone else subscribing to the relevant databases such as Lexis-Nexis may access full text of many of the documents directly.  Others studying the controversy should still find the identification of material and the chronological listing helpful, even though they must obtain the actual texts through their own resources.  Lehigh students also have access to many documents, as noted, through an internal Course Documents file. 

Though this site will continue to serve the Lehigh courses, we offer it on the World Wide Web since we expect that others will find varied and valuable ways to benefit from organized access to the primary material in this dramatic recent example that "history matters."